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Have you heard what happens when a prolonged power blackout throws men and women together with no warning, and no television. The word is that they love each very much in a special way, and nine months later, a miracle happens, and the Maternity wards of hospitals are full of happy couples and lovely little reminders of the event. It’s a sweet story, but totally untrue.

The first recorded blackout happened in New York, on 14 October, 1889. The New York Times headline read, A Night of Darkness - More than One Thousand Electric Lights Extinguished. But it was not a technical fault that threw New York into darkness, it was an order from an angry mayor.

Back in 1889, over 16,000 light bulbs burnt in New York - 15,000 in factories and homes, and 1,000 on the streets. The electricity was carried to them through high-voltage cables. The contracts had specified that all of New York’s electrical supply wires were to be safely buried underground. But the crooked board members at the New York Board of Electrical Control handed out the lucrative contracts to their relatives and friends. They took the money, but just hung the wires aboveground, on poles.

Unfortunately, there were other wires there already - telegraph, alarms and telephone wires.

On October 11, 1889, a Western Union linesman accidentally touched one of the live power wires. According to the New York Times, “the man appeared to be all on fire. There was no movement to the body as it hung in the fatal burning embrace of the wires.”

The Mayor of New York, Hugh Grant, was angry. He ordered that all electrical power be shut down until the wires were safely buried underground. The New York Times reported that “the sudden disappearance of so many glittering lights through the heart of the city” made “the aspect of the city … decidedly provincial.”

Electrical power is lovely. With electricity, you can run a fridge, so you can store food for days or weeks, instead of having to throw out what you can’t immediately eat – and when you eat it, you can heat it.

If you have one electrical generating station, you need one more for back-up in case the first one dies. If you have five stations, you can still get by with just the one for back-up. But if you have 10 power stations, you don’t need a separate back-up station. Each of the 10 power stations usually has enough reserve capacity (say, 10%) to be able to share the extra load between them if one of them stops working. That is one of the big advantages of having electrical power stations tied into a grid.

One of the disadvantages is that the grid becomes very complicated to run.

Probably the biggest blackout in history was also in North America. It happened on August 14, 2003. It affected 50 million people from Canada to New York and Michigan, and it took a week before power was reliably restored.

The system that crashed was enormous. At the time of the blackout, it had 142 separate regional control rooms that oversaw the activities of some 3,000 utilities. In turn, these utilities ran some 6,000 electrical power plants with a total generating capacity of 61,800 MW.

This blackout was so huge that it affected the very chemical make-up of the air. Thanks to the blackout, these 6,000 large electrical powerplants had to be suddenly shut down.

Within 24 hours, the air over northeast USA and parts of Canada became suddenly cleaner. The SO2 level dropped by 90%, O3 by 50%, and “light-scattering particles” dropped by 70%.

Unfortunately, the American electrical grid had been deregulated in the 1990s. Cost-cutting and profit-gouging took its toll on regular maintenance. Another factor was the big profits involved in long-distance electrical power sales. This meant that the load on the grid increased, making it even more complex to run.

But did the clearer skies now mean that there was more love in the air? Did the Blanket of Darkness create a Hot House climate that generated more babies? I’ll talk more about that, next time…